RJC

The bottom of the barrel is where Scott Brown and his right wing cronies live and breathe.
Anyone who has EVER bought real estate knows that flipping a house requires that you buy the house, fix it up and sell it to willing buyers. Excuse me Scott Brown - but isn't that the bloody market place that you and your masters on Wall Street love to talk about all the time?
Thousands of people did this in the 90's and before the bust. If the Warrens did this - good for them - it shows that they were invested in their community and also shows that she is not some wild eyed neo- communist as Brown and his professional liars on the right are bleating about all the time.
When is the press going to ask Brown why he is calling Warren a socialist while feigning outrage over three perfectly ordinary CAPITALIST business deals? Is Brown a secret Socialist??

Are you kidding me? Most of Springfield had no power. Like most people on my block my snow blower and shovels were in the garage behind a locked electric garage door - not to mention the 15 feet of tree limbs standing in the way of even getting near the garage.
How about reserving that wagging school marm finger for WMECO and the city of Springfield who after a hundred years of electric lines on poles still haven't figured out that a regular tree maintenance program is a lot cheaper and more effective than a week without heat and lights and paying crews from Missouri to work overtime to do the work after power goes out for most of the city?

# 1 is true only if you exclude FICA and Medicare taxes so therefore your point is misleading.
# 2 is not true at all. Germany and Japan both have higher corporate tax rates than the US. In fact because of the numerous exemptions and deductions available for corporate tax payers the effective corporate tax rate is fairly close to the lowest of that list rather than the highest.

Why would this be necessary? Heterosexual people are by most accounts about 92-94% of the population. They don't need visibility from this kind of event because they already have it every day. However, if you want such a celebration, go for it. Put in the effort - just don't expect much for your trouble. I think you're just as likely to get a rise out of people as you would if you held a celebration of all things not Irish on March 18th.

After nearly 7 years of gay marriage in Massachusetts are you people still on that hobby horse? Are you paying attention? Marriage in Massachusetts hasn't collapsed, children haven't taken up lesbianism and witchcraft and the social order hasn't come undone.

What has happened? Exactly nothing. A few thousand comitted couples have married; some have families with children and raised them in good loving homes, life has gone on and in all that time there has been no fire and brimstone, none of the dire nonsense that your crowd trotted out beforehand.

For the rest - abortion is someone else's moral choice. If you don't like abortion, please - don't have one. If you think you are supremely qualified to make moral choices for others, please let me refer you to your record on gay marriage. You didn't get that one right, so maybe you should limit your authority for moral choices to yourself and leave the rest of us to muddle through on our own.

Sadly uninformed? Like believing that the President of the United States lied about where he was born? Like believing that Global Warming is a hoax? Like believing that cutting taxes will increase federal revenues?

These days watching the right wing come up with new nonsense is like having a front seat at the best freak show on earth.

I don't think that the Governor actually ran on that union busting thing. I think he kept his plans pretty vague since - oh maybe about 65% of the voters of Wisconsin do not agree with his union busting program.

Do you want to account for the big drop in the Governor's approval ratings since he started this? This kind of shows that the people of Wisconsin didn't elect him to do what he's doing now.

Just a thought - don't want to interupt your right wing delusion festival for too long.

No thought here about just what kind of tyranny you'd all get if there were no Democrats around to keep the right wing in check. I mean, we've NEVER seen any evidence of right wing corrpution or anything like that have we so why do we need anyone looking over their shoulders - eh?

Um, er, well maybe all that Abramoff stuff, and all those big cash campaign contributions and all that K street stuff and all those big Wall Street bonuses given from our money and all the illegal campaign cash and all that stuff about the State Attorney Generals and so on.....

Do you want to be fair and balanced and take note of the fact that there is an equally corrupt relationship between the Right and the weathly and corporate interests (at the expense of the rest of us)? After all, the wealthy corporate and financial interests get a lot more from the right for their money than any unions get for theirs.

There will be no backlash and the "outrage" over this came and went without all that much mainstream attention. Most people just don't get all that riled up about gay marriage anymore. All the arguments have been proven false and all the over-wrought predictions have not come to pass. We've had gay marriage here for almost 7 years and no deity has rained down fire and brimstone on our heads, masses of women have not turned to lesbianism and witchcraft and heterosexual marriage is still alive and well - and frankly doing pretty well here in Massachusetts.

Since this doesn't have anything to do with your marriage - one has to ask - why are YOU so riled up about this?

The whole body of argumentation against same sex marriage is demonstratively false.

We here in Massachusetts have had legal same sex marriage for almost 7 years. None of the wild eyed, nutty predictions from the right have come true. Massachusetts still has one of the lowest divorce rates in the country - and some of the highest are in the South where there is open political hostility to gay marriage. Children have not been recuited and in fact a recent study showed that GLBT parents have slightly better outcomes with adoptive children than adoptive children in different sex families - probably becuase gay parents are still scrutinized far more exhaustively than non-gay parents. So far, children have not been taught sex acts in Kindergarden. So, after 7 years of concrete evidence that same sex marriage has no negative effect on heterosexual marriage or anything else for that matter - why do we believe anything these crazy bigots have to say on the subject?

Please don't bother with the biblical argument. If you've ever eaten a pork chop or shrimp, worn blended clothing or slept with your wife during her menstral cycle - you have no room to quote Leviticus or anything else in the Bible on this subject.

It never ceases to amaze me how comfortable conservatives are with rank hypocrisy. A previous poster noted that President Bush did exactly the same thing with over 700 signing statements. More on point was the Bush Administration's decision not to defend the Roadless Rule in court - not because they thought it was unconstitutional, but simply because they didn't agree with it. I didn't hear any conservatives then or now accusing the Bush administration of failing to uphold the law.

DOMA is about as unconstitutional as you can get. It violates Due Process, Full Faith and Credit and the 14th Amendment. If you want to see what I am talking about read DOMA but insert the words "Christian marriage" in every place where "same sex marriage" is refered to. If you do that, you'll quickly see just how utterly unfair and unconstitutional this law is.

Are you conservatives all about principle or are you about preserving your prejudices at all costs? Join Ted Olson and prove yourself more principled than prejudiced.

It never ceases to amaze me how comfortable conservatives are with rank hypocrisy. A previous poster noted that President Bush did exactly the same thing with over 700 signing statements. More on point was the Bush Administration's decision not to defend the Roadless Rule in court - not because they thought it was unconstitutional, but simply because they didn't agree with it. I didn't hear any conservatives then or now accusing the Bush administration of failing to uphold the law.

DOMA is about as unconstitutional as you can get. It violates Due Process, Full Faith and Credit and the 14th Amendment. If you want to see what I am talking about read DOMA but insert the words "Christian marriage" in every place where "same sex marriage" is refered to. If you do that, you'll quickly see just how utterly unfair and unconstitutional this law is.

Are you conservatives all about principle or are you about preserving your prejudices at all costs? Join Ted Olson and prove yourself more principled than prejudiced.

Don't we teach our children that words hurt? Isn't one of the commandments about "bearing false witness"?

Our children see what we do and compare it with what we say. Now, here is a religious leader who is telling our children that words don't matter and you can spew any kind of slander you like because those words don't have anything to do with the violence that almost always follows it close on the heels.

All over the world right wing hate talk turns into right wing violence and these people wash their hands of any responsibility and keep at it.

I don't understand how anyone could see this bigot as any kind of legitimate moral leader. I suppose the people who hate and have to have someone to tell them it's ok to hate might be attracted to him but who else?

I won't rebut the results of poll that aren't honest - I simply reject them as I reject the premise of your argument. As for the polls, look at the context, the questions asked and you'll find out that the poll was designed to elicit the results it got.

Regarding my comment about those who desirved the uniform - it's quite simple really. The people I was writing out were people who did their jobs and served their country. Someone wearing the uniform who puts their own prejudices ahead of their duty to country - they don't desirve the uniform.

Some people mention an agenda - the only real agenda here is the one that the right wing has to impose their own ideology. Your arguments don't have legs. As time goes on more and more Americans are just simply not buying it all. Hatred and bigotry always burns itself out in the end.

President Truman didn't take a poll to determine if the military should accept integration. He just told the military to do it and they did. A few Generals quit, some bigots had to be fired, but in the end the military followed orders - as they are trained to do and as it is their duty to do.

The problem with taking polls, particularly the ones that Cervenyjr references, is that polls are often flawed. Ask the question one way, you get one answer. Ask the same question a different way, you get a different answer.

More importantly, polls are a poor excuse for not living up to our principles as free people, equal under the law. Living up to lofty principals isn't always easy, but it is always worth the effort. Polls don't reflect that. They simply reflect whether the person being asked the question has an opinion. Frankly, we all have those and many of them aren't always very lofty.

The right approach to this issue for the military is to ask them to live up the constitutional principals that each and every person in the military takes an oath to uphold. Either we believe in equality under the law, separation of church and state and the principal of inalienable rights - or we don't. If we do, then we should stop arguing this point and just do what is right. Put it that way and your 80% opposition to gays in the military will wither away like dust because simply the decision to join the military requires a degree of awareness of those lofty principals that is often missing in the editorial pages and the halls of Congress. I trust the military to be strong enough to deal with it all. I don't believe that they are as weak and unprincipled as cervenyjr suggests.

I have a good reason to have faith in our military. I served in the military alongside gay and straight men and women. No one I knew who desirved to wear the uniform cared a bit about that. We were all Americans and we all served our country out of a sense of patiotism and duty. Who we went home to at the end of the day just didn't matter, just as it didn't matter where we worshiped or what color skin we had. Sure, some of those people didn't much like people of other races and creeds and orientations, but we all knew that we were able to get past our prejudices and live up to our duties as Americans.

Perhaps if we American would spend less time listening to cynical pundits, politicians and religious leaders who use divisions and fear to capture power this might all seem just a little less important than the principals that make us Americans in the first place.

We can do that or we can just keep dividing ourselves until one day we wake up and there is no more America - just a nation of people fighting and hating one another.

Then our enemies will have won and our little experiement will have failed. Is that what you want?

Scott, I agree with you - the decision to fire Christine Judd was political and not a very smart one at that.
The Diocese is playing with fire with this issue. How do you think this might have played out if Christine were not Catholic but rather, say Jewish or Unitarian or one of the other dozen or so religious traditions that do religiously sanction same sex marriage?
The diocese does not now discriminate against other religions when hiring teachers. By the standards being used to justify firing Christine, they could be guilty of practicing religious discrimination if her marriage had been religiously sanctioned.
Should the diocese fire teachers who come from a religious background that does not hold to the doctrine of transubstantiation? Should the diocese fire teachers who do not consider Jesus divine? Are they really proposing that no one teaches at CHS unless thier personal lifes are consistent with Catholic doctrine? Any of the current teachers at CHS who are known to hold views counter to church doctrine fall in the same boat as Christine who married her same sex partner.
I don't know about you, but I think the diocese has waded into some very deep waters here with their petulant and very political decision to selectively enforce a very vague code of conduct and make a point with Christine. Obviously there was no conduct that was an issue - just simply the fact of a marriage that occured during the summer break and, oh yes, a tattle tale letter to the bishop from someone who obviously didn't like Christine. What principal are they enforcing anyway?
If I were the lawyers for the diocese, I'd be dancing a jig over the news that Christine won't sue. The diocese dodged a bullet here, but they don't seem to understand that they dived into the deep end of the pool with this excuse for firing this fine teacher and they got out of the deep end because the woman they fired gave them a lifeline. Ironic isn't it?
Who's next? What teacher is going to be fired for conduct inconsistent with Catholic doctrine? What are the non-catholic teachers at CHS thinking? Are they worried they might be next? After all the secret informants get their personal vendettas rewarded by the diocese and the anti-gay, anti-non-catholic purges finish, what will be left for the students at CHS? What kind of education will those kids be getting while the diocese tries to purify the faculty of CHS?
It's all sad and it could all have been avoided by simply practicing a little discernment. Remember that? Saint Ignatius Loyola had much to say on the topic of discernment - thinking before acting - considering before judging. Too bad the Bishop and his administrators weren't paying attention that day at the seminary.

Adultry, greed, lust, lying and idolotry are also sins too. Are you proposing that the Catholic church should enforce a policy that no one can be a teacher unless they are sinless? If so, I can assure you they are going to find it very hard to recruit teachers. Is that what you wish?

Of course not. This has nothing to do with principle. This was a purely political act to metaphorically burn a heretic in order to establish and maintain clerical control. There's nothing noble or principled in it at all.

As long as you are playing the "truth" card, consider this: there is nothing in the teacher code of conduct that addresses gay marriage. The only thing is a vague statement that you could drive a truck through. By the definition that seems to be in operation now, any teachers who have been divorced, who are found to use birth control or who have ever had an abortion, comitted adultry can be fired. Of course no one expects the diocese to do anything of this sort. Does anyone really think that the diocese was really enforcing "catholic doctrine" ? This was a political act designed to make a political point about gay marriage. This is identical to the petulant withdrawal of the Boston archdiocese from the state foster care system.
Please don't characterize this as an act of principal - it reeks of political showmanship not principal.

Did you consider that many of the teachers at Cathedral High are not Catholic? How would want those teachers to be judged by your standard? Those who don't go to Mass because they are Baptist should be fired for not following Catholic doctrine regarding the sacraments?

If the church wants only to hire to Catholics so they can impose doctrinal discipline on teachers, then the church should fire all the non-catholics and then enforce what they want - not that such a thing would make many friends.

On your point about polls, you are just flat wrong. Polling in Massachusetts, as in other New England states shows wide margins IN FAVOR of gay marriage.